Boris Eifman's project to make modern, sexy ballet out of the Russian classics is a precarious one. In his 2005 version of Anna Karenina, the characters are so crudely extracted from their original context that they're reduced to anonymous cliche. Onegin, created four years later, threatens to do even greater violence to its source. Not only does Eifman update Pushkin to the present day but he takes every opportunity to ratchet the poem's emotional drama into torrid, orgasmic kitsch.

Yet despite the ballet's excess, it has an imaginative energy, an engagement with its source that feels more Russian, more vibrant than the familiar John Cranko version. It is carried primarily through Eifman's reimagining of period and place. The opening scenes portray Onegin and Lensky forging their friendship in the revolutionary ferment of 1991, their duets framed by news footage of protesters filling Red Square. When Onegin visits Tatiana at her rural home, we are immediately aware of her provincial remoteness, as her friends gossip listlessly in the mosquito-plagued heat; down at the village disco you can almost smell the frustrated hormones along with the cheap beer. Fast forward to 2009 and Tatiana's reincarnation as a woman of the world: we can gauge the full loss of her romantic innocence as Eifman portrays her as a product of the harsh, glossy consumer culture of new Russia.

The choreography suffers from the usual Eifman dynamic: ignoring the small transitional emotions that can make characters most convincing, the small transitional steps that can phrase acrobatic moves into eloquent dance. But he compensates with powerful theatrical imagery. The spectrally dead Lensky is dramatically presented as both the hero's angel and his demon. The closing image of a feverishly writing Onegin, surrounded by a blizzard of paper, creates a vividly apt coda to the poem: a lost soul trapped in a limbo of whirling words.